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The Rear View

13 April 2012

A friend and correspondent who shares many of my worldviews sent me a link to science writer Matt Ridley's hopeful piece on "seventeen reasons to be cheerful". RR readers of these pages know that I am of the opinion that the western world is now beyond the tipping point, that we are headed for a gut-wrenching redirection of civilization at the rapidly approaching confluence of dysfunctional political ideologies, accelerating technology, and wholesale popular 'dumbth' (q.v.). Ignoring many substantiating facets of this argument, Ridley gives us a salutary view of how we got here, and a very optimistic look into our future. While definitely blindered, the seventeen reasons will nevertheless bring cheer to some readers who judge my glass to be excessively dark. Enjoy.

05 April 2012

A reader sent me this little blast from the past, published in the year I first set foot on these shores. The ode below was composed as it became clear that the nation’s flirtation with communism in the Great Depression had not been fully purged by Truman’s partial efforts to sunset some of the more egregious New Deal programs after WW2.

As taught by many economists and political philosophers of the classical liberal persuasion and Austrian schools (Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, …), socialism is a cancer of democracy. Any trace that is left, inevitably begins throwing out shoots and growing again. There is little hope of eradicating it, only assiduously nipping it in the bud before it begins its inevitable road to metastasizing the body politic.

And we have not nipped it in the bud. Instead our public schools have now graduated two successive generations of citizens who are either collectivists or don’t know the difference between collectivism and a freshly painted corral post. But we cannot claim to have not been warned, and are now arrived at the end of the long road which for both ourselves and the Europeans is turning into a trail of tears.

29 November 2011

On these pages I have argued long and hard that the permissive environment in which mortgage lenders made subprime loans was carefully constructed and energetically promoted by the congressional social engineering programs of the Democratic Party augmented by a klatch of RINOs. Yesterday’s announced retirement by Rep Barney Frank (D-MA), one of the prime perpetrators of Depression2, motivated this post of the record pointed to by an RR reader.

Since the 2008 election we have heard the constant and now-famous wail from our President, echoed by Democrats in Congress, that seeks to absolve him and his cohort of any contribution to the present financial mess.

Actually, Mr President, it wasn’t. The sequence of events presented below was taken from President Bush’s White House website in September 2008, and it is open for refutation by anyone who can show that the public record is in error. (Source: NiceDeb)

27 November 2011

Communist spying and influence on our national policies have long been denied/diminished by our Left. The public experience in uncovering these activities within our government was not sufficient to change any minds in our unions, mainstream media, or the halls of academe. Things should have changed when the USSR collapsed in 1991, and the subsequent opening of some KGB historical files that contained conclusive evidence of atrocities like their massacre of Polish intellectuals and its officer corps in the Katin forest, and spying/infiltrating activities in all western governments. No contrition from our progressives save a stiffer upper lip. New evidence from more released files has produced added historical works on “revealing accounts of Soviet espionage in America, from the 1930s, when the pickings were easy, to the unforgiving Cold War era.” Short summaries of books on the topic, including some classics, are presented in the 26nov11 WSJ here. We expect no change in the historically impervious Left.

‘The New Tammany Hall’ is how Leftwing historian Fred Siegel sees the last forty years of public-sector union permeation into all levels of government in America. Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, is still able to call them as he sees them. In a recent interview Siegel acknowledges that “The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it.” The quotable interview is worth a read for the independent voter, and also as a stress test for the rock solid progressive. The happy conclusion from this is that there exist Leftwing intellectuals who are still Americans first.

Many of us keep wondering how long the national ‘green jobs’ farce will be continued at a government budget near you. Organizer Obama has been touting green energy jobs for as long as he has been a sty in our public eye. Every day we hear of more corruption, misdirection, lies, and malfeasance in the government’s nurture of the crony socialism that is the country’s green energy industry. In spite of this, the traditional (read fossil) energy sector today employs over 440,000 workers, and since 2003 has grown 80% in its number of American jobs. And this growth doesn’t take into account the multiplier effect for non-energy jobs to support all these workers and their families. Now the Left is real good at claiming all kinds of multiplier goodies for their mythical green jobs projections, but howl their heads off when the same analysis is applied to real jobs and job growth in our workforce.

In the meanwhile the political corruption continues without so much as a sniffle from our journalistic stalwarts. Well almost; according to the Washington Post Obama’s $38.6B green loan program had created – drum roll please – a whopping 3,500 jobs compared with the 65,000 he touted the program would “save or create”. And please don’t look under the rug where all the Solyndras have been expeditiously swept. There is no learning here, the beat goes on.

Now for the good news (almost). Since the government nationalized the nation’s school loan program, someone in the bureaucracy had their bulb light up. To save the entire enterprise from going bust sooner than later, why not discriminate in who gets the loans. Don’t lend to students with dumbbell majors who will have little chance of paying back the loan. What a concept! But don’t hold your breath, this has yet to be implemented. And dumbbell majors got rights too, know what I mean?

Stupid once, stupid forever. My favorite socialist site truthout.com skidded on yet another patch of slick progressive history. In it Martin Bennett and Richard Walker write ‘Job Crisis: What did Roosevelt do that Obama should?’ This piece deftly cherry picks the sorry record of Depression1 in the 1930s, and concludes that we can replicate FDR’s performance (recall the National Recovery Act and its alphabet soup of jobs programs) by taxing the bejeezus out of the ‘rich’ and closing corporate loopholes. They turn a blind eye to the high hard statistic of that era that is oft repeated in these pages – unemployment was at 17+% in 1933 and still in 1939 when Sec Treas Morgenthau confessed to Congress that nothing had worked except growing government, running up the country’s debt, and extending the misery. The socialists’ standard response to such failures over the decades has been to double down and do it again. It still is.

[28nov2011 update] This morning Rep Barney Frank (D-MA) announced that he has reconsidered, and will retire at the end of his current term in Congress. This is the man who is one of the authors and energetic goads of the subprime loan mess, the pompous ass who assured the nation that Fannie and Freddie were in the best of health and doing the right thing in buying all those worthless loans, a member of the dynamic duo of the Dodd-Frank 'Wall Street Reform Act'. Except for separating the trust and investment functions of banks and insurance companies (as they were before the ill-advised Republicans joined them), the law is a typical one step forward, three steps backward in creating unnecessary frictions in America's financial industry. So along with the hastily retired Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) of Countrywide scandal fame, the pair will be in a timely retirement instead of jail for their shady careers on the Hill. Both leave/left easy shoes to fill, and the sad part is that the voters of Massachusetts and Connecticut have been up to the challenge.

21 June 2011

A friend and RR reader emailed me the link to a Washington Times article by Richard Rahn that summarizes the economic history of Estonia. Readers may recall my posts from our 15-29jun08 visit back to the old sod (see posts under ‘My Story’, right column). Misplaced modesty prohibits my adding anything to the Rahn article. I only draw your attention to it as a part of the larger apologetics that may be seen to underpin my socio-economic biases expressed in these pages. As such, the source may all be in my double-helix, or perhaps in the water I drank as a young child. Hard to tell.

30 May 2011

Today we remember and honor the military service men and women who died for us, and those who have yet to come home. We sent them into harm’s way to keep harm away from us and our loved ones. They went willingly again and again to do the work of war with the belief, and sometimes only hope, that their country was behind them.

Since the days of muzzle loading rifles and the Constitution class of frigates, one way Americans heading for battle knew their country supported them fully was in the quality and supply of weapons and stores they were provided. In the main, these were always the best that was available for warcraft. And with innovative entrepreneurs free to invent, make, and sell, America soon set the standard for getting there firstest with the bestest and mostest – once our politicians had things sorted out.

Besides the many items about Barack (Barry) Obama that Cashill excavates and assembles for us, the author’s product is another massive indictment of the state of American journalism, a profession populated and defended primarily by the left. Hackleman’s conclusion contains this –

“Most unfortunately, the deconstruction of congenial myths is often received with the same enthusiasm as a stool specimen in the baptistery. While Jesus of the gospels said that the truth will set you free, one of his most poetically ardent defenders recognized that "nations grown corrupt" would rather take "bondage with ease than strenuous liberty." This fact is made obvious by the struthious apologetics that day by day through the popular media continue to anchor the myths of Dreams and Audacity.”

Would that in 2008 more of us had known only a fraction of this. (H/T to RR reader.)

22 February 2011

The role of public employee unions in the sacking of America has long been denied by the socialists. This is the political crowd that is regularly elected to office through the support of these same labor organizations. They are the closest thing the left has to a franchised criminal class in our society. Their extortions and fraudulent practices over the decades have become legend. My own position on such organizations is well known to RR readers (latest here).

Now, thanks to a mid-western governor attempting to save his state from fiscal ruin, the entire question of how the public unions have bilked the populace may get a proper hearing. My hope is that the union bosses and their political lapdogs will spread their demonstrations across the land. Then all will be able to see what has been festering under their local state house or county administration center. For more see Steven Malaga’s ‘The Showdown Over Public Union Power’.

If Second Amendment rights were not such a serious matter, the latest leftwing hypocrisy on gun control would draw a bit of chuckle, and we would leave it at that. It seems that rabid gun control advocate and North Carolina state senator R.C. Soles shot one of the two intruders that recently entered his home. As part of the ruling class, the good senator does not have to worry about his gun rights, but he and his kind worry very much about our gun rights.

It is an old story in the annals of collective governance. Their greatest fear is the armed law-abiding citizen. It is not the criminal that worries the left wing; hell, the higher the crime rate, the higher taxes and more government spending they can justify. But it is the armed citizen who strikes fear into the heart of all insipient autocrats, for that citizen will be pushed only so far before he bands with his fellows to resist tyranny. And if they have the tools at hand to put up a fight – well, you know the rest. To counter that, all of us must be disarmed by whatever subterfuge our would-be masters can muster. But the picture of the 74-year-old senator, shootin’ iron in hand, blasting away while defending his home, does bring up a chuckle or two. You think the incident has changed his mind any? Me neither.

Meanwhile, a happier piece about guns is the role that a particular air rifle had in implementing our ‘manifest destiny’. Take a look at the above video (H/T to RR reader) to get the full story. But Lewis & Clark in 1803 made it clear across the American west and back to St Louis by not trading shots with the Indians, but by showing them the power and glory of one particular firearm, and an air rifle at that. Historian Stephen Ambrose mentioned that weapon in his Undaunted Courage, but the full story of this unique weapon was not known to me until I saw the video.

09 January 2011

Back in the stone age when we were young, a lot of emphasis was put on teaching children how to behave in various social situations. And we were taught that there existed different kinds of social settings in which this behavior was OK, that behavior was required, and those behaviors were definitely ‘out of place’. Our lives then had different kinds of places.

As a boy, I was taught that I was different from a girl, and that it was my responsibility always to show certain deferences to the opposite sex. Girls were equally instructed about boys. We had definite roles to play which would grow and change as we grew. All of those roles might be called formalisms, and could be gathered under the canopy of a culture – our culture.

So instructed, one of the many benefits we kids had was that we knew how to ‘be’ in literally any situation in which we found ourselves. I looked forward to being taken to various observances, celebrations, meetings, and other purposive gatherings. I knew how to greet people, what to say and do. I knew my place, and everyone else there also knew my place and respected me when I maintained it properly. From my secure place it was a blast to see the adults do their thing with each other, most trying to maintain their places, some trying to achieve a better place, and a few even falling out of place. I was learning all about places that people had in my culture, and also what it took to get from one place to another. Adult watching was a lot of fun, and profitable as I entered the job market – first as a paperboy, then as a farm hand, and on into a machine shop as the only kid at a work station. We kids knew what to do when.

06 January 2011

Syndicated columnist and scholar Victor Davis Hanson is a keen observer of humanity’s foibles and the progressives’ programs now playing on our national stage. He recently wrote a mid-term assessment of Barack Obama, the man and the President, in a piece titled ‘Our “Pay No attention to that Man Behind the Curtain” Moment’ that could be sub-titled ‘Look Ma how We Shrunk the President!’

The piece begins –

At some point in late 2010 once optimistic independent voters, moderate Republicans, and centrist Democrats stopped listening. They abruptly concluded that their 2008 Barack Obama proved not to be the great uniter, the great communicator, and the greater humanist who was to bring the country together around “centrist” values.

At about the same time, a once ecstatic liberal base began to worry that President Obama was not the brilliant postracial social organizer, the brilliant progressive explicator, and the brilliant big government architect who would take a center-right country with him hard to the left.

RR readers know that I have not been a fan of Obama’s ideology, nor his background, experience, character, and approach to governance. As President he has been a good-looking guy who knows how to deliver a speech; otherwise, an empty suit. Hanson’s detailing of the sorry record of his first two years is a must read. I urge you to invest the time.